Locally famous (in Milpitas anyway) homegrown, low-budget horror film The Milpitas Monster (1976) just aired Saturday night on Northbay TV's (channel 49) "Creature Features," a reboot of KTVU's long-running horror movie series hosted by the late Bob Wilkins. As SFist's own movie critic Rain Jokinen notes on her Musty TV blog, Wilkins apparently used to crack jokes at the expense of Milpitas on air back in the day, which inspired some Milpitas high school students and their photography teacher to set about making their own monster movie. The tongue-in-cheek horror flick is an unsubtle commentary on growing environmental problem of landfills and garbage  the Milpitas Monster is a creature created by/grown out of human-dumped garbage who comes back to kill people, a la Godzilla.

"It's terrible and it's great," says Rain of the film, which you can watch in full on YouTube above, albeit in pretty degraded condition (there are lighting issues throughout).

The movie was made by students at the now gone Samuel Ayer High School, thus the joke about this being a "Samuel Goldwyn Ayer" production.

Current Milpitas High School art teacher Irene Hentschke sings the praises of this so-bad-its-good movie in a review you can see here, which comes ahead of a scheduled big-screen viewing event on Halloween Eve, Monday, October 30, at the Milpitas Great Mall Cinemark Century theater. "The Milpitas mayor, police chief, city council members, police officers, firefighters, Milpitas residents, town drunk, high school principal and teachers were all wrangled into a docu-horror drama playing their own authentic roles," Hentschke writes. "Watching this very original rendition of a '70s California small town is like a blast in the past in Technicolor."

The movie was screened in Milpitas last Halloween, and they're doing it again this year, with what appear to be a couple of the original cast members in attendance. Find tickets here if you want to go on Monday. DVDs are also available at that link.